Color and memory combine and inspire the abstract paintings in Deeps of Peace, an exhibition of fifteen new paintings by Brian Rutenberg.  While Rutenberg has probed and illuminated aspects of the landscape throughout his career, in Deeps of Peace he focuses on the feeling, motion and experience of his birthplace, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the nearly pastoral beauty of the coastal lowlands meets the neon, architecture and attractions of the town itself.

I am the product of one place that has two faces. Two landscapes, one natural and one artificial, collided head-on at breakneck speed, secreting a liquid that was bright and combustible. That liquid has been the jet fuel for my paintings for four decades. Forcing two places that didn’t go together together made me a painter.

Brian Rutenberg, 2022

As a teenager, I admired the local artists who painted carnival banners for their design acumen, clarity of intentions, and purposeful execution. Whether for the Ten in One show, the Pie Eating Contest, or The Human Cannonball, each banner was a visual description not of what will happen, but of what could happen…I titled many of these new paintings Banners of the Coast to address how those signs created a formal familiarity in my memory and, from that visual Rolodex, manufactured an aesthetic that intensifies the wondrous strange of a specific, local experience…

Brian Rutenberg, 2022

When you stand in front of a painting you are standing in the same spot that the painter did as he or she applied every delicate skin of color. Two people, the maker and the taker, share one footprint and consciousness. Together, they manufacture a place that has never existed before and will never exist again.

Brian Rutenberg, 2022